Coastalblog

So, this morning, the boy Miliband advanced a fairly modest policy to normalise tax regulation for those classed as non-domiciled in the UK. It’s pretty small beer, more of a token gesture. Non-doms make up 0.4% of the overall tax base, but in terms of fairness, it’s reasonable enough. A bit of a win-win for Ed, puts him on the populist side of a debate, doesn’t actually amount to any real difference in the grand scheme of things. A bit like announcing a manifesto promise to not punch any ponies in the face. Then? Oooh, turned out Ed Balls had said that this may not necessarily be such a good idea, in a somewhat equivocal interview a few months ago. That it might cost money, as the rich fucked off in a sulk, but it was something that needed looking at. Cue an Olympic standard display of synchronised squawking from Tory High Command. “A shambles, chaos” said Cambo “ A shambles, chaos” said Osborne, only in a slightly more strangled voice. “Chaos, a shambles” said Gove, ever the ic...

I’m trying to be fair, really I am. I’m attempting to consider the government line – that the change in pension flexibility, coming in today, which allows those over 55 to withdraw money from their pension pot as and when they see fit is a sensible policy, designed to help trustworthy consumers take charge of their own finances. That’s what Osborne says it is. And if you squint hard enough, it can indeed look like that. And yet, and yet...we are told we are in the midst of an economic recovery, and certainly GDP growth seems to reflect that (the heady heights of 2%, people). However, the rebalancing of the economy which was trumpeted by Gorgeous George was predicated ion the idea of growing the manufacturing base, ramping up exports, making us a nation of makers, in his phrase. Get the British making stuff, sell it to other people, take their money. That’s how the recovery was supposed to work. Except exports have, in fact, fallen. And whilst manufacturing has increased slightly, c...

Grant Shapps, Ladies and Gentlemen. Grant Shapps. Graaaaaant Shaaaaaapps. Drink him in. Revel in his presence. Grant Shapps. Grant fucking Shapps. As I have, at times, attempted to point out, my politics are largely of the left. This does not, however, preclude me from liking the odd Tory on a case by case basis. I have reasonably sane friends who are conservative. We can disagree wildly, but we’ll rub along. However. Grant Shapps. Graaaaant Shaaaapps. The Shappinator, the Shappmeister. Cap’n Shapps. No, no, I don’t see he and I getting along. There are people who are conservative because they’re traditionalist, there are people who are conservative because they’re already quite wealthy and they’d quite like to stay that way, thanks. There are people who are conservative because they live in a jolly nice town and everyone else in their jolly nice town is. There are people who are conservative because well, that’s just what one’s family does, in the same vague, unthinking British w...

With the mother of all messy elections now a mere two months away it’s the time to sit back and take stock. Really think about the options presented to us as voters, weigh up what the parties stand for, how it chimes with our beliefs, or not, as the case may be. Or, alternatively, now is the time to tot up which party is offering us the heftiest bribes, and vote accordingly. We’ve come a long way since the wild west days of parliament’s infancy. Back then, bribery for votes, a practice known as “treating”, was commonplace. None of that sort thing now, of course. Shabby, demeaning and corrupt. Wouldn’t want anything like that damaging the good name of parliament (stop laughing at the back). However, whilst bunging an individual a quid for their vote is strictly verboten, attempting to do the same thing to entire demographics is de rigeur. How else to explain the boy Miliband’s promise to knock large swathes of squids off the cost of tuition fees? Is it done from political convicti...

Oh I dunno, you turn your back for a few weeks getting your arse handed to you by the lunch-hungry public and the world and his civil partner fall over themselves to ladle blogworthy soup into my news-hungry bowl (that image worked better in my head than on the page, I realise). Should I have posted about Cambo deflecting attention from his mates at HSBC enabling fraud by pointing the finger at fat people? Possibly. A despairing state of the nation address about the England cricket teams almost heroic cock-ups in the World Cup? Perhaps. I should certainly have written something about the Telegraph’s disgraceful attempt to use the suicides of News UK employees to distract from its own appalling kowtowing to aforementioned fraud-enablers HSBC. Yes, should definitely have done that. I could have written about the first signs of spring in the garden, the rhubarb shyly poking its pinks spears up. I could have written about how I’m rereading Gravity’s Rainbow, and loving every syllable. ...

So this is heading to be the messiest election in history, and, in sympathy, the media coverage has been the messiest in history. Whilst by no means a Labour tribalist, it’s been dismaying to me to see the news outlets falling over each other in their eagerness to give Ed Miliband a kicking. Rofl he can’t eat a bacon sandwich, lol what a weirdo etc. And the more this sort of thing occurs the more it makes me wonder why the coverage has been so shrill, so personal, so unpleasant. They don’t think he’ll actually win ? Do they? Because it certainly seems like it. There’s been very little in the media about dissection of Labour policies, all the talk is of party rifts, of the Greens nicking votes in England, the SNP wiping them out in Scotland and yet, stubbornly, the polling puts Labour slightly, ever so slightly, ahead. So the old ways crank back into action, Osborne chucks pensioners a bribe in the shape of a bond, because he knows they’ll vote, the Tories' donors sigh, reach ...

When Tesco announced a while back that it was closing a bunch of stores I’m sure many people felt, as I did, an obscure sort of hubristic satisfaction. Even if you don’t pay much attention to their more unappealing habits, there is a vague sort of sense that companies like Tesco are the enemy. If pressed, one might wave one’s arms vaguely and mutter something about forcing suppliers prices down, or express doubt about the ethical quality of their supply chain. Also Tesco= supermarket, and supermarket = death of high st, and probably that nice little specialist food shop you like, but only go in once a year. Because you’re in Tesco. So their increasing travails have been a low level of background mirth in my world over the last year or so. Tesco suffering? Ha, and furthermore, ha. Ohh, share price tumbling? Poor lambs. So it came as, if not a jolt, then at least something to pull one up short when I read the list of stores to be closed and discovered that the Ormskirk one sat nestled...

It’s impossible to let it pass without comment. You know what happened. Gunmen entered the offices of Parisian satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo and killed twelve people. There’s no point piling up the adjectives. You know what an horrific act this was. Me saying so on the internet isn’t going to make a blind bit of difference. You know that the perpetrators are murderers, who bear as much relation to their religion as the Crusaders do to a vicarage tea party. The usual condemnations pile up. The worn-out rhetoric of outrage, only so shopworn because we’ve had too much cause to use it the last fifteen years. This isn’t going to be a long piece, there’s no point in it being so, mais de tout couer avec Charlie Hebdo. Je suis Charlie.

I have a large degree of sympathy for Mark Pritchard, the MP who has today been informed that the rape inquiry hanging over his head has been dropped due to a lack of evidence. To be accused of such an appalling and stigmatising crime would be a blot of anyone’s reputation (apart from Ched Evans, it would seem). Depressingly, the court of human nature tends to return a verdict of no smoke without fire (along similar lines, it’s interesting to see how many people are absolutely ready to believe the allegations laid at Prince Andrew’s door. Not that I’m saying it didn’t happen, and his taste in friends is clearly beyond questionable, but they are, as yet, merely allegations), so to be accused of rape, however falsely, is a lifelong burden. However, it was depressing to see the rapidity with which he started banging the drum for altering the anonymous status of the accusers and accused. I can understand his position, in his place I’d feel something similar. I can’t imagine what it must...

Some years ago I went through what’s best decribed as a Haruki Murakami phase. My reading habits are normally varied, but every once in a while I’ll binge on a particular author, and at that precise point he spoke to me deeply. The seeming detachment of his protagonists spoke to my own level of engagement with the world, their surrounding themselves with their interests seemed to me to be the way I lived. Even the fantastical elements chimed perfectly with how I was seeing the world at that point, dystopian, seemingly aimless on the surface but intimating that there was far more to discover. In essence each book seemed to be a pretty cool guy versus the world, both this one and, occasionally others. This is a horribly reductive view of it, of course, and barely scratches the s of the word “surface”. This is why I don’t write literary criticism. Suffice to say I read him voraciously for a few years and then stopped. Whether it was the similarity of the protagonists, whether the otherw...

I alluded to this in my first post of the year, only half-jokingly. I do have a profound fondness for Pied Wagtails, you know the ones, jaunty black and white , their gait described (quite accurately) by John Clare thus: • Little trotty wagtail, he went in the rain, • And tittering, tottering sideways he near got straight again. Anyway, part of the reason for my wagtailophilia is proximity, there’s a cock whose hunting ground is the flat roof at the back of Source, so adjacent to my kitchen, and every time I have to peel myself away from the stove for one reason or another, I’m sure to see him bobbing about hunting (pied wagtails are insectivorous). To my mild amusement he quite often pecks merrily away at the window which lines the stairs, to percussive effect. Anyway, I like him, I like them. Pied wagtails, as my nearest available bird are a daily reminder for me, when it all gets a bit grindy, of the world outside. That there are things other than the stove, the prep list, a...

Convicted rapist Ched Evans has been offered a job by the current league leaders in Malta , Hibernians (on no account to be confused with Scottish side Hibernian, who have not offered convicted rapist, Ched Evans, a contract). Now, there has been some controversy as to whether or not convicted rapist, Ched, Evans, should be offered a position playing for a football team, as that is what he does for a living. The rape’s more of a sideline. Some argument s have been made along the lines of time has been done, debt to society paid, what have you. I have some sympathy with these arguments. The whole idea of our justice system is, in theory, based upon redemption and rehabilitation (stop laughing at the back). Other arguments, (including those advanced by convicted rapist, Ched Evans), I have less sympathy with. You know the ones, at the least repulsive they start with “who hasn’t had sex with a girl who was too drunk” (Um, me. Most people. You see, if she was too drunk to say no then I ...

To general surprise, expressed, I note, in a tsunami of shocked tweets and facebook stasuses, the year 2014 has been followed in numerical order by the year 2015. Whilst this is noteworthy in and of itself (possibly a jump to 2036 was expected, or maybe a hop back to the heady days of 1878) it is not, on its own, much cause for a blog post, the first back after the horrors of December, but by way of easing myself back in gently, I suppose it’ll have to do. I was, I confess, half tempted to just start again without any reference to the date whatsoever. It all seems a little pat, starting off the New Year with a post about the New Year. Maybe an essay about my fondness for Pied Wagtails, or a brief discussion of the poetry of Lee Harwood. Maybe something rude about George Osborne. Still, too late now. The New Year it is, so we’ll have to just plough on regardless. So welcome to 2015, the one after 2014 and presumably, immediately prior to 2016. As 2015 is a different number from 2014 ...

The posts have dried up of late, I know. And this will be the last of the year. A slightly more prolific version of regular service should resume come January. It is, you see, December. And making my living as I do by cooking stuff for people pretty much rules me out of anything resembling a normal existence once the festive season starts to bite (and also rules me out in November, on account of I’m trying to get ready for it). It is impossible to describe what December is like in a kitchen*. Any accurate description would seem absurdly hyperbolic, so I’m not even going to try. All I will say is that it doesn’t stop. At any point. If you’re not cooking service you’re trying to plug the gaps in your prep list,. Should by some miracle you find the time to do that then hey, there’s a catering job just come in and you need to pony up food for a hundred in a couple of days because who plans ahead? But mostly it’s the deep prep. The basic jobs that are the backbone of a professional kitche...

With her tweeted photo of a house, a white van and England flags Emily Thornberry has managed to blow any political capital that Ed Miliband may have been able to make from the Tories capitulation to UKIP in Rochester and Strood. She’s also exposed, at a stroke, one of the problems that Labour needs to address if it’s to be considered a credible political party. The Labour party’s big problem, post-Blair, is that it doesn’t seem to remember what it stands for (hint: the clue’s in the name). There is a chasm between traditional working class Labour and the Blairish metropolitan elite, of which Thornberry’s tweet was a particularly sneery, unlovable example. It seems to have forgotten the working class, and if you neglect your traditional voter base,, you’re going to struggle. What seems particularly odd is that the photo was of a white van. The shorthand is simple. White van = tradesman = works with hands = working class. This is the equation which should have been running through ...

As even a cursory glance at the news informs you, the world can be a dark and unpleasant place. Innumerable horrors and degradations are inflicted upon people worldwide, grotesque acts committed as a matter of course. We tut, express disapproval, and go about our days. Set against the global backdrop of general nastiness, it can be easy to overlook acts closer to home. Take, for example, the disturbing case of a bird sanctuary just up the road from where your correspondent types this. This place, manned and run by volunteers takes in injured birds and nurses them back to health. Harmless enough, who could possibly object to that? Well, someone in Mawdesley does, as a sequence of attacks by night on the place have left hundreds of birds killed and maimed, bones broken, attacked by dogs. It’s the sort of action which causes as much confusion as it does distaste. Why on earth would you want to? The sane response is bafflement. This sort of petty, small-village malice is a world aw...

Living as we do in a world of shopping, where even your email tries to sell you yoghurt, where adblock is as essential to the online experience as a healthy sense of scepticism, and facing as we are the looming commercial behemoth that is the festive season, when would you imagine the world’s busiest online shopping day to be? Sometime soon, certainly, as people start to think about beating the annual December postal snarl-up. Something similar to the fabled Black Friday, when the US loses its collective mind in tsunami of credit card abuse. So it comes as a mild surprise (not to mention a gentle reproof for being surprised, big wide world out there, don’t forget) to discover that it was yesterday. Nov 11th. Busiest online shopping day of the year. And the reason is the Chinese observation of Single’s Day. Essentially Valentine’s day for single people, single people buy themselves gifts, eat fried dough sticks (to signify the numerals of 11.11) and generally have a high old time of...

When my alarm went off this morning, I lay in the dark and thought about lists. The first thoughts upon waking (apart from the standard existential angst and dread) we as follows: Burgers, spare soup, fish pie, potatoes, millionaire shortbread, tarts, lemon drizzle cake. The prep list, written up on my whiteboard at work, waiting for me, the shape of my morning. I am a chef, an occupation which requires order and discipline to work effectively. I am also, by nature, disorganised and somewhat messy. This clash is (in part) resolved by lists. Your prep list and your order list are your sun and your moon, imposing order on a situation which could all too easily spiral out of control*, one missed job, or ingredient unbought can spark a catastrophic chain of events. No jam? Can’t make Bakewell tart, no tart? Other desserts get hammered, the prep list grows, priorities change, other jobs get missed, maybe a regular doesn’t get the dish they want. The approach has bled through to my non-k...

(further to the last piece, it may be worthwhile pointing out that not EVERYTHING I read was ancient*) I managed a single new poem at last week’s reading, or rather twenty odd very short new poems plucked from one longer work which is currently being tinkered with. In the finest traditions of my magpie poetics, the idea was “inspired by” (read: ripped off wholesale from) the sainted and discussed elsewhere in these pages Georges Perec. Reading his collected short pieces Species of Spaces (take the exhortation to buy and read as read) I was struck by a piece called Two Hundred and Forty three postcards in Real Colour (dedicated to his friend and other hero of mine, Italo Calvino). Simply put the text is the standard matter of postcards, weather, food, scenery, but the overall effect is hypnotic in its banality (and in the knowledge that, this being Perec, there’s something else entirely whirring away in the background). This evolved into 99 Postcards for Georges Perec. Me being me...

Performance (The dust has settled and back I slink like a penitent drunk, birthdays and tasting nights having kept me away. Also a reading, the main inspiration behind this piece). Last Wednesday I stood up in front of a roomful of people and read poems that I’d written for twenty minutes or so. Not in itself an unusual occurrence for me, though far enough out of the ordinary to cause me a couple of nights of broken sleep wondering what on earth I was going to do. I felt a fraud, to be honest. My writing habits are slow, and over twenty years I’ve managed to amass a grand total of two chapbooks. The upshot of this being that, when reading from my “latest” book, I may be reading a piece that’s up to sixteen years old. Fair enough, the audience may not have heard it before, but it still feels slightly like one of those sad eighties revivals tours, with multiple acts coming on, doing the hit, and fucking off. It reminds me of how little I have actually got done, thus far. But, with s...